Call centers are under increasing pressure to provide high-quality service while controlling costs. Call center systems must be highly reliable since availability of the customer support service is critical. As call centers handle increasing volumes of incoming calls, the call routing solution must be scalable so it can expand to include additional locations, as well as capable of rapidly integrating new technologies.
A growing trend in carrier-grade telecommunications systems has been the evolution away from centralized call control applications to more distributed architectures. This has been described as moving the intelligence “to the edge of the network,” in that the call features that historically have been programmed into a hardware switch are now well separated from the switch that handles the call. This trend has been enabled by the availability of architectures such as the NORTEL® Advanced Intelligent Networks (AIN) and similar architectures, which separate feature creation and processing activities from the normal call-processing activities of a switch and move these activities to a central location shared by many switches.
In such an environment, there is the need for increased automation in call centers in the United States.
Moreover, there is a need for a method and system that economically and effectively integrates the telephone company operator and call center services.
There is a further need for a suite of independent systems integrated into an open software-based solution for user contact automation that combines advanced network call control, speech recognition and agent-backed integration.